Jonah is a tale from Tanzania, with beautiful graphics and visuals, it tries to question what is development and what happens when it is not managed well. The central characters are two friends who like the geography of small coastal town are young, unabashed, full of dreams and potential. They accidentally sight a beautiful fish, take its picture and in a series of delightful graphics, the small virgin town gets filled with flashy billboards and buildings. The film hints on a rivalry between friends, as one gets more famous than the other, but the friend instead of being jealous starts feeling concerned as the opportunities are not making his friend better.

As the town loses its innocence so does the lead characters and in a timeleap, when the characters have turned grey, we see that when the neon lights are switched off, the town that was once beautiful is now polluted and crumbling. The clear white sand beach is now punctuated by oil refineries. The fish, that was the source of attraction has also become grey and old with layers of filth deposited over it.

From here, the film takes a surrealistic turn that's a visual feast and ends with questions that will keep you thinking for a long time. The director Kibwe Tavares was an architecture student and hence the techniques of 3D design and modelling work readily for him. At the same time, architecture is a philosophical art, and larger concerns of social systems and culture inform its practice, and this film seems to function on a larger social level where the director fuses his social consciousness with personal storytelling.

After enjoying a viral success, this film was selected in Sundance in 2012.